Tommy Conway: Canada, the world's 'Nice Guys'

We've become a spiritually and morally weak people, incapable of being meaningfully good.

By: Tommy Conway

Note: Though the author’s true identity is known to us, Tommy Conway is a penname. They deployed to Afghanistan as a trainer for the Afghan National Army. The author’s employer currently restricts what they can publish, however, we at The Line feel that this perspective is worth sharing.

In the past couple of months, the Taliban — a group of foreign-backed fanatics who briefly ruled Afghanistan from 1996 through 2002 — retook the country. Many, including President Joe Biden, attributed their victory to the cowardice and duplicity of the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Indeed, the ANA had a lot of problems.

It was corrupt and often disorganized. It lacked basic skills. I knew many of its soldiers because I helped to train many of them. But for all the ANA’s problems it was neither cowardly nor hopeless. Afghan soldiers I knew spoke reverently of a unit commander who sacrificed himself by colliding with a car bomb to protect a column of his troops. Despite their poverty, they shared their chai and naan, and even their meat and vegetables with those of us sent to train them. A shocking 66,000 ANA soldiers died fighting the Taliban. The problem with Afghan endgame wasn’t the ANA.

It was, and is, us.

Lauren Dobson-Hughes has written eloquently on how Canadian institutions are failing to measure up to crises. I am far more pessimistic. We do not merely have an institutional problem, but a spiritual one. The peoples of the Western democracies have lost their sense of shame. Canadians, in particular, have lost our collective self-respect. We have become “nice guys,” the sort of people who expect to be praised because we can do no harm. We have ceased to be a citizenry that values honour — the kind of people who are capable of doing hard things, and willing to spend a lot of effort doing the right ones.

During the Afghan war, many NATO soldiers lived in very harsh conditions “outside the wire.” In forward patrol bases or on extended missions, water was at a premium, so washing socks was a weekly treat. But for others, Afghanistan meant a lot of time generating PowerPoint decks in bloated headquarters. Go past the walls in Kabul which separated the safe NATO bases from the bustling city, and one could find cafes staffed by friendly Nepalese baristas, air-conditioned gyms, and plentiful cold drinks.

Absurdly, in the American compound at the same Kabul International Airport where desperate evacuees tramped through trenches of human waste and barbed wire to escape the country as the Taliban advanced, the U.S. Air Force maintained a pleasant compound with green grass. Kandahar International Airport was well-known for a much-frequented strip of fast-food outlets, including a Tim Hortons.

These amenities warped the perspective of those with regular access to them. Canadian Army lore is full of tales of confrontations between bedraggled, unshaven troops coming in from patrol being denied access to an iced capp for improper dress. I’ve rarely been so embarrassed as the time I took tea from an Afghan father of three, smiling in the sweltering heat of an Afghan summer, only to return to my relatively comfortable quarters behind safe walls to hear people bitch and moan about the fridge being out of their favourite pop.

It wasn’t just individual troops who lost perspective. Senior leaders made a big deal about receiving two beers on Canada Day, and put extensive measures in place to conceal the festivities from Afghan staff because the presence of alcohol might offend cultural sensibilities. I am not a cultural expert, but I imagine the locals were offended about the well-watered, visibly overfed, air-conditioned people in less than a kilometer from the poverty of the population they were supposed to be protecting. Some of the old-timers, who had served with the Communist army, stated categorically that they liked the Russians more because they shared their vodka — and their hardships.

We barely had perspective then, and we sure as hell don’t now.

Predictably, the further from the theatre of operations, the more that perspective was distorted. Somehow, the Canadian public grew “war-weary” over Afghanistan, though it’s difficult to understand what tired them. Between 1939-45, this country sustained a full field army, despite drawing from a population a third of today’s size. Canadians withstood rationing as tens of thousands of their countrymen died overseas, and came out of the war optimistic about the future.

Part of that resilience was rooted in the idea that honourable behaviour was both possible and desirable. In October 1941, months after the Wehrmacht stormed into Russia and shortly before the United States joined the war, Winston Churchill could tell a gathering of schoolchildren:

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty —never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

It’s easy to look back on Churchill’s speeches as the hypocritical oratory of a flawed man, but that misses the point. What matters is that the speech went over well, because the audience — both at Harrow School, in Britain, and in the West generally — were inclined to think in terms of honour and duty and necessary hardship.

Compare that to what we suffered in Afghanistan; we sustained a strong battalion group, and maintained a few bloated headquarters — all of this proved to be too much to keep up. Canada slid into a training mission in 2011 and then gave up completely in 2014. During the fighting, the vast majority of the population felt no impact whatsoever. As Tom Nichols paraphrased a U.S. officer in Iraq, "We're at war, America's at the mall." Canada was there with them, complaining about the lines in the food court.

This obsession with ease has infected even executive thinking. Take Joe Biden’s remarks when reassuring his nation about abandoning their allies:

“Look, if we had decided 15 years ago to leave Afghanistan, it would have been really difficult.  If we decided five years ago — if we start — if we continued the war for another decade and tried to leave, there’s no way in which you’d be able to leave Afghanistan without there being some of what you’re seeing now.

But what we’ve done so far is we’ve been able to get a large number of Americans out, all our personnel at the embassy out, and so on.

And, thank God, so far — knock on wood — we’re in a different position.”

Churchillian it is not.

In addition to Biden’s gratitude at avoiding any hard fighting, he took time to take a parting shot at the ANA, and neglected to mention the disgraceful U.S. withdrawals in the night. Say what you will about the Afghan Army not fighting the Taliban head-on — the Americans didn’t even bother to look at their friends them in the eye as they abandoned them to their fate.

The Americans, at least, have no illusions about being “nice guys.” Canadians do, and Canadian actions make the difference that much plainer. The Americans left with a sneer in 2021: we left with a smile from a combat mission 10 years earlier. Sure, fighting the Taliban was the right thing to do, but it was hard, and there was no prospect of a near-term payoff, so why bother?

The nicer the Canadian, the worse the hypocrisy gets. Peggy Mason of the Rideau Institute, who usually expounds about the need for a “women, peace and security” agenda has already taken to the keyboard to discuss the benefits of engaging with the Taliban, a group of thugs who are interested in sexually enslaving girls as young as 12 and have reinstated public executions. Maybe we should drop these affectations and call ourselves what we really are: spiritually and morally weak people, incapable of being meaningfully good.

I look with hope on the interpreters coming off the aircraft — at least those whom we didn’t shamefully leave behind — because in those people I see people who have fought the good fight, who know what hardship and gratitude are. They are worthier of our inheritance than we are. I hope that in the next few years we collect ourselves as a citizenry and begin the hard work not to be honourable, but to be capable of acting honourably. I doubt we will, though. A cynical smirk is easy for policy wonks and a trite tweet is easier for journalists. But we can’t afford this easy self-satisfaction anymore, even if we decide to become an irrelevant, inward-looking corner of North America. COVID came to us, and so will climate change. The lessons we need to learn from Afghanistan aren’t about military strategy, but about ways to find the will to, in the words of John F. Kennedy, do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com